What is This “Entropy”? Explained Very Briefly

Can You Use Entropy in Your Life for Success?

Atahan Aslan
3 min readJan 28, 2023
“Chaos” from Unsplash

Science and physics is very interesting. Not many people understand the depth or even basics of how things work in both of these terms but they could actually be very interesting in simple terms. How our universe works, how we work, how everything works in any given environment can be epxplained with physics. You can do this both with very simple terms and also with extremely complicated sentences.

Entropy is one of those things that makes up the life we have and keeps it at an extremely well-balanced way. You can incorporate entropy everywhere, in everything you are building. Whether that’d be data science, software coding, or something else.

Entropy Meaning

Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. In simple terms, it is a way to describe how “mixed up” the particles in a system are. For example, imagine a room with all the furniture neatly arranged in one corner. This would have a low entropy because everything is in a specific, ordered place. Now imagine the same room but with all the furniture scattered randomly around the room. This would have a high entropy because everything is in a disordered, random state.

In thermodynamics, the study of energy and heat, entropy is often used to describe the amount of thermal energy that is unavailable to do work in a system. The more disordered a system is, the more entropy it has and the less energy is available to do work.

In information theory, entropy is used to describe the amount of uncertainty or randomness in a message. The more uncertain the message, the higher the entropy. For example, a message that is completely random, like a string of letters with no pattern, would have a high entropy. A message that is highly structured and predictable, like a simple counting sequence, would have a low entropy.

Its Interest

The idea of entropy is interesting and full of meaning. Many people find this idea rightening and perplexing at the same time. Many people were drawn to the bleak picture of rising chaos and thermal death, which is typical of equilibrium physics and isolated ecosystems.

Entropy is used in this context to identify and quantify the decreasing availability of high-quality resources (i.e., resources with high entropy and low free energy), the increase in pollution caused by the release of waste, chemicals, and heat into the environment, the increase in social disorder caused by degraded living conditions in megacities around the world, the “collapse” of the economy, and so on.

In summary, entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, randomness, uncertainty or the amount of thermal energy unavailable to do work in a system. It can be used to describe the state of a physical system or the information content of a message.

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Atahan Aslan

A writer who is passionate about startups and business that focuses on informing people about these subjects. Also publishes on decentfinancelife.com